Patrick Mooney reports on a notion tossed around by baseball agent Scott Boras.
Having seen the media circus and national attention the NFL gets for its Super Bowl Week, Boras wants MLB to adopt the same format: have a World Series Week at a rotating neutral site.
“Baseball is serving up great steaks and we’re serving it in a drive-thru window,” Boras said. “We’ve got to change that. We need a ‘World Series Week.’ We need the World Series in one city,
so that all journalists, from all over the world, can plan a year in
advance and come to one place, stay there and watch these two teams go
at it for seven days in one spot.”
“We’re talking about the betterment of baseball,” Boras said. “If we
continue to do this on a regional scale, we’re going to lose something
that baseball deserves. And what it deserves is world attention. And to
keep the product at that level, you’ve got to create a platform (so) the
world can attend.
“Most corporations and most journalists and most everyone involved
— because you don’t know where the World Series is going to be until a
day or two in advance — they have not budgeted (for it). They have not
funded it. There’s no plan for the attention required to go and focus
(on it).
“There’s so much more we can do when we know where the World Series
is at. We can have so many events. We can involve corporations. We can
have national media, international media. (But not knowing) where the
World Series is going to be is making it a regional event.”
But one needs to realize that Boras is talking from a bias. He would like to see MLB generate a ton more money for the league and teams so the money pool grows to pay his clients more money in free agency. As we have seen, professional sports franchises are hitting the ceiling on broadcast revenue channels. Actual fan attendance will probably go down as many teams continue to price the average family out of baseball as an entertainment option.
Adopting another sports "championship set up" can lead to disaster. When the PGA adopted NASCAR's end of season points qualifying system to pare down the field to a small championship chase, it continues to be a confusing disaster. It was so much easier to crown a golf champion based upon earnings rather than a made up point system.
The greatest obstacle to a World Series Week would be the possibility it would take away a national fan base of Cub loyalists the opportunity to see a World Series played at Wrigley would be anarchy at its highest level.
